Carola Lovering Books in Order

If you’re new to Carola Lovering: Tell Me Lies → Too Good to Be True
If you like twisty relationship thrillers: Too Good to Be True → Can't Look Away
If you’re drawn to stories about female friendship: Can't Look Away → Bye, Baby
If you prefer to read in publication order: Tell Me Lies → Too Good to Be True → Can't Look Away → Bye, Baby

Carola Lovering writes contemporary novels that blend psychological suspense with messy, complicated relationships. She’s the author of Tell Me Lies, Too Good to Be True, Can't Look Away, and Bye, Baby, stand-alone stories that linger on desire, secrets, and the fallout of bad decisions.

She grew up just outside New York City and was the kind of kid who devoured books but wasn’t sure how that love of reading would ever translate into a job. At Colorado College she majored in English, gravitating toward classes that let her experiment with voice, character, and interior monologue.

After graduation, Lovering moved to New York and did the practical thing: she took a job in public relations. The work was steady, but she’s talked about feeling creatively restless, knowing she wanted to be closer to words than press releases allowed. Little by little she began pitching essays and features, and her byline started appearing in magazines covering travel, culture, and wellness.

Those years of nonfiction writing turned into an informal apprenticeship. Interviewing people and shaping their stories gave her a feel for pacing, tension, and the quiet details that make a scene feel real. At the same time, she was beginning to imagine a novel that would look honestly at the kinds of obsessive, not-quite-healthy relationships many people experience in their late teens and twenties.

That project became Tell Me Lies, a story about Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco that tracks a long, on‑again, off‑again college romance and the way it follows them into adult life. Lovering wrote the book over several years while working other jobs, drawing on emotional truths from her own young adulthood without turning the novel into autobiography. Published in 2018, it found a wide readership and later inspired a television adaptation for Hulu, bringing her characters to an even larger audience.

With Too Good to Be True and Can't Look Away, Lovering leaned further into psychological suspense. One book unspools a whirlwind engagement from three competing perspectives, exposing a disturbing marriage-for-profit scheme; the other moves between Brooklyn and a wealthy Connecticut suburb as it explores first love, marriage, and the kind of toxic friendship that can upend a seemingly stable life.

Her 2024 novel Bye, Baby shifts the focus to female friendship and motherhood. Set between a New York City apartment building and the women’s shared Hudson Valley past, it opens with a baby gone missing and quickly becomes an examination of loyalty, envy, and the lingering effects of childhood secrets.

Across these books, certain patterns keep showing up. Lovering often writes about anxious young women who seem to be doing well on the surface but are quietly wrestling with grief, disordered thinking, or mental health challenges. Money, class, and social status matter in her stories, as do the pressures of social media and the ways love can blur into control.

Today, Lovering lives in Connecticut with her husband and two young children, balancing family life with the long, solitary work of writing new novels.

She’s especially interested in the moment when a character finally recognizes a harmful pattern and decides whether to keep repeating it or walk away. That tension—between the comfort of the familiar and the risk of change—sits at the heart of nearly everything she writes.